Tag Sleuth Case Studies

One of the great features of Tag Sleuth is the ability to export social media data into Excel, such that it can be mined with other tools. This scenario is exactly what Dr. Nigel Williams of Bournemouth University is teaching his students to do, with the help of Tag Sleuth:

“Conducting research on the nature of stakeholder engagement in large scale undertakings (public construction such as railways, airports and infrastructure) and large scale events (the Olympics or the World Cup) is a challenge for researchers. Traditional techniques cannot easily evaluate the structure and content of these discussions. However, due to the significant level of public interest, these undertakings generate a huge amount of social media postings that can be used to understand the structure and content of these discussions. My team at Bournemouth University have launched a number of initiatives to apply this data in research and teaching activities.

"In the research domain, we use data from social media to the nature of digital engagement in such large scale events and undertakings using a combination of Social Network Analysis tools (Gephi) and Text tools (Discovertext). We’ve delivered our findings at a number of research conferences and have published book chapters, etc. We’ve also received funding from the university for a project FestIM.

"For teaching, we provide course materials that students can learn to apply these techniques in their class projects and research. We’ve used Tweet Archivist for the last two years as it provides an easy to use approach to data collection. It’s also low cost, which works well for students who need to do twitter data collection for their dissertations. As social media has continued to develop, we’re seeking to expand our data collection beyond Twitter and Tag Sleuth is ideal for our needs.”